The Spoils of Patience

I only got into The Game of Thrones this year, and the reasons I waited are part of the pitfalls of being a writer: you know what’s going to happen next. My wife hates watching detective show with me because I always know who the killer is right at the beginning. We watched that show Castle nigh religiously, and 99.9% of the time I knew who the killer was within the first three scenes.

When Game of Thrones first because popular, I tried the first episode, and I tried reading the first novel; but I had to put them all down. I knew where the stories were going. George R.R. Martin is a brilliant author, but he was using a lot of tropes I was already very familiar with. He was referencing real history that I already knew. Few writers have the craft put all these stories altogether in such an enjoyable and entertaining way, but I could at least recognize all of them.

Examples:

The family’s bastard will return from exile to save the family.

The tomboy whom all the boys make fun of will level up and become a badass.

The last good man in a city of sinners will be killed.

Till he comes back with a cannon, biznitches!

Naive girl married off for political gain comes into her own as a leader.

Though the show is still very good at playing with audience expectations, most GOT fans have started to see where the story is going, which is why this season is so satisfying. How many years have viewers waited to see Daenerys on a dragon dive bomb the Lannisters?

Well, I wasn’t willing to wait that long, so I put off Game of Thrones until the story reached the point that I could see coming. So I binge-watched a little bit, and it was worth the wait. Yes, the show is good and really well-made, but I also didn’t have to wait years to see Daenerys and Jon Snow finally meet.

And I didn’t spend a year with that crap with the Great Sept in Season Six. How frustrating was slogging through that storyline for weeks on end. C’mon, Cersei. Didn’t you know he was gonna come after you?